More Than A Magazine, A Movement
The biases of poverty, sex and race have always motivated reproductive policing.
The U.S. needs a reproductive justice bill of rights—because without it, we continue to risk the gravest atrocities carried out with the official endorsement of the state on women and girls in the United States.
Immigrant women at the Irwin County Detention Center in Georgia, with little to no knowledge of the medical procedure, were forced to undergo unwanted hysterectomies.
The United States has an ugly, and often hidden history of forced sterilization of immigrants, people of color, indigenous women, and anyone else seen as “unfit,” and therefore expendable, by the powers that be.
China’s Uyghur minority are facing a gendered campaign of forced birth control—recent reports document plans for forced IUD placement, mandated abortions, and sterilizations and injections that have been reported to cease menstruation cycles. Many experts say this constitutes a serious risk of genocide.
Recent Supreme Court cases allow for the (legal) discrimination of women educators at religious institutions—from health coverage to termination.
Although reproductive rights are under attack around the world, there remain some bright spots for women’s reproductive rights and contraceptive access.
In the Philippines, since 2012, when reproductive rights and education were finally enshrined in law in this fiercely Catholic country, the government has committed to providing free family planning services to those living in poverty.
Together, June Medical and Little Sisters of the Poor represent the dawning of an unprecedented attack on reproductive rights and justice.
The Supreme Court’s decisions this term are a severe blow to reproductive health care access, especially for low-income women and women of color. Yet, those legal decisions are not the end of the story.
Despite overwhelming support for contraception, the Supreme Court opted to allow employers to single it out and makes women financially responsible for the full cost of contraception: the most fundamental part of their reproductive well-being.
As a result, contraception will be too expensive for some women to afford.
On Wednesday, in two decisions—Little Sisters of the Poor Saints Peter and Paul Home v. Pennsylvania and Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morrissey-Berru—the Supreme Court ruled in favor of any employer using religious grounds to discriminate against women in health care insurance coverage and exempted religious employers from anti-discrimination laws.
In a 7-2 decision issued on Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld Trump administration rules allowing employers to opt out of providing birth control if they have religious objections. Feminists are reeling from the devastating ruling that prioritizes employers’ religious beliefs over women’s rights to bodily autonomy and full control over their reproductive lives.
The birth control pill is already available over the counter in many countries around the world. Now, reproductive rights advocates in the U.S. are campaigning to make the pill more accessible and affordable.
